In 2015, after a violent attack on her beloved partner, Virginia Eubanks suddenly became an unpaid kinship caregiver. In the weeks, then months and years that followed, the pair faced a cascade of setbacks: police disinterest, suspended health insurance, inadequate medical care, lost income, lost friends, endless paperwork, and a serious case of post-traumatic stress disorder. Then, a second case. Eubanks developed what is known as “collateral” PTSD, common among caregivers but rarely discussed.A reporter and an activist, she turned to reliable sources to figure out how to heal: scientists, therapists, trauma theorists, social movements. But it wasn’t until she happened on an old lifesaving manual and a series of outdoor survival courses that she found practical advice that actually helped. Join Eubanks to learn what lessons kayak self-rescue, winter survival, map and compass navigation, bushwhacking, wilderness first aid, and lifeguarding offer to help solve America’s catastrophic crisis of care.
Virginia Eubanks is an investigative journalist, essayist, and memoirist. She is the author of Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor and Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age, and co-editor, with Alethia Jones, of Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith.
Her reporting and essays have appeared in major publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Scientific American, The Nation, Harper’s, and Wired.
Eubanks is currently writing a memoir that explores community violence, caregiving, and wilderness survival. In partnership with Andrea Quijada, she is also collecting oral histories about the global automated welfare system for Voice of Witness. She has held fellowships and residencies at institutions including MacDowell, the Edward Albee Foundation, New America, the Carey Institute for Global Good, and the Blue Mountain Center.
Her upcoming talk will draw on her new book, A Guide to Open-Water Lifesaving, which examines the lived experiences of trauma and caregiving. https://virginia-eubanks.com/a-guide-to-open-water-lifesaving/
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